


Enough

by FluffyBeaumont



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Protective Spock (Star Trek), Star Trek Beyond, Top Spock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:34:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22841080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FluffyBeaumont/pseuds/FluffyBeaumont
Summary: McCoy's ability to heal is severely compromised after an unexpected epidemic aboard the Enterprise, and when he finally falls, Spock is there to catch him.
Relationships: Leonard "Bones" McCoy/Spock
Comments: 10
Kudos: 151





	Enough

By fourteen hundred hours that afternoon he was exhausted. Exhausted, but unwilling to admit it, even to himself. The epidemic - the _plague_ , for that's what it was - had afflicted nearly two hundred of the crew, most of them very young, most of them far from home and vulnerable. As vulnerable as he'd been, the first time he'd stepped aboard a starship. Of course he was older, well into his thirties, seasoned, a doctor of some years' experience, who'd been in the field and who'd seen death up close and personal. He'd seen how the young died, and it was no different from the way more experienced Starfleet officers died, whether suddenly and all at once or slowly, lingering in agony for a while. What he never told anyone was how each death stole something from him, some essential particle of his life force, leaving him diminished. The first time he'd done a surgical rotation during his internship, the head of surgery had told him he was too sensitive, that he cared too much, and he'd better by God figure out some way to feel less or he was going to find himself in a sorry state indeed. In all the years he'd been a doctor, he'd never managed to find some way to feel less. He felt it all, like he was some Betazoid empath with all his sensors turned on full. 

He was still in Sickbay two hours after his shift had ended. He knew he ought to leave, knew that his body and his mind both needed rest, but a young Tellurian ensign was showing the tell-tale lesions and he wanted to stay and keep an eye on her. Christine Chapel tried in vain to force him to leave, because he was having none of it. "I've got a job to do, goddammit, and I'm gonna keep doing it until I'm satisfied these kids are out of danger." Christine went off shift shortly afterwards, was replaced by a Bolian whose name he didn't know, but who completed his allotted tasks with a quiet efficiency McCoy appreciated. Two Vulcan interns, a male and a female, moved silently between the beds, making notes on their padds and conferring quietly with each other. Goddamn Vulcans. Everything they did had the gravity of ritual.

He sat down behind his desk and spent some time inputting the results of a new drug trial he was conducting. His assistant, Doctor S'tala, had compiled the most recent research data with typical Vulcan efficiency, but McCoy felt compelled to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb. He needn't have bothered: S'tala's data were organized by date and according to symptoms, with everything cross-referenced from Hell to breakfast. He rubbed a hand over his forehead, squeezed the skin between his eyebrows. The data were compelling, but the drug just wasn't working, dammit, and so far, nothing they'd tried had made one damn bit of difference. Every single day, two or three patients slipped into coma and from there into a quiet, peaceful death, which infuriated McCoy. He was supposed to be saving them, dammit. And he was failing miserably.

He laid his head in his hands and closed his eyes. So tired. It would be so easy to lay his head down on the desk and slide into sleep. He felt like he could sleep for days, but no, he couldn't allow it. There was work -- 

He did put his head down, and the world blurred, and he fell into a dark well of sleep that had no bottom.

"Doctor."

That voice. He knew that voice. Spock's voice. Good Spock, gentle Spock, _Vulcan_ Spock. "What the hell do you want?" he asked. He was obliged to be abrasive. It was simply the way they did things.

"Doctor -- Leonard -- you are exhausted. I am taking you to your quarters so you can rest."

"I can't..." He tried to pull away, extricate himself from Spock's grasp, but the Vulcan was insistent. "I can't just -- goddammit, Spock, I can't just leave these people!"

"Doctor Selar is more than capable of caring for your patients in your absence, and you do require rest."

"I can't simply leave--"

But it was futile. As he rose from his chair, a strong arm caught him underneath the knees, scooping him into Spock's arms, and he was being _carried_ , for Christ's sake, carried like a child--- "Spock, you put me down this instant! What the hell do you think you're doing, you green-blooded goddamn--"

And then the door to his quarters swished open and he was being lowered gently onto his bed, his boots tugged off, his socks and trousers removed, his shirt.... When he was stripped to his underwear, Spock pulled back the covers on his bed and urged him, with touches and murmured imprecations, to slide between the sheets. "Dammit, you can't keep me here!" He tried to get out of bed, was gently pushed back down by Spock's hand in the middle of his chest. The Vulcan's skin was warm, dry, as befitted someone who came from a desert planet and Vulcan was nothing but desert... _had been_ nothing but desert...but Vulcan was gone, destroyed by the madman calling himself Nero...yes, the mad Roman emperor who some believed had deliberately started the Great Fire of Rome. And he, McCoy, was being dumped unceremoniously into bed by a madman, who figured he had to strip McCoy naked in order to make him obey.

"Hush, doctor." Spock was closer to him now than Spock had ever been, and there was something burning in his dark eyes that McCoy recognised, something they'd nursed and nourished between them in a thousand little ways: sniping and arguments, appeals to logic, to an innate sense of fairness, insults, feigned anger that hid an overweening want. This, then, _this_ was the culmination of McCoy's secret desire, something he had never voiced to anybody, not even Jim Kirk, who was in so many ways the keeper of all his secrets. Perhaps Jim had already guessed the truth that ran like a scarlet thread through every one of their arguments, the mannered disquisitions that so entrammeled them, tying them together.

Spock lay on top of him and kissed him, and McCoy's body rose to meet him, as their mouths met and clashed, lips pulling and sucking, tongues dueling, hands moving everywhere there was naked skin to touch. Spock was lean and pale, his chest furred with thick, dark hair, and his long-fingered hands knew how to find the hidden places on Leonard McCoy's body, to tease responses from him that he was all too ready to give. They moved together like men in a shared trance, like men drunk on their desire, divorced from reason and the everyday clamour of the senses. And he came -- hard -- the climax pulsing out of him, throbbing along his limbs, his release powerful enough to melt his bones--

"Why do they call you 'Bones'?" Spock's warm breath spilled over the shell of his ear; Spock's arm was around his waist, his mouth touching McCoy's skin here and there and everywhere.

"I don't remember." He turned his face and captured Spock's mouth with his. "Why do they call you Spock?"

"It is my name, doctor." The Vulcan's voice was an amused rumble against his ear and McCoy was smiling, then laughing, curled close around his lover -- yes, his _lover_ , this strange and austere Vulcan that he knew as well as he knew his own soul--

"Sleep," Spock murmured, his arms tightening around McCoy's exhausted body. "Sleep now, doctor. Sleep."

When morning came, it found them clasped together in Leonard McCoy's bed, arms and legs entwined, bodies and souls equally comforted. It was enough.


End file.
